Uncoordinated Cooperative Forwarding in Vehicular Networks with Random Transmission Range

This paper investigates cooperative forwarding in large highly dynamic vehicular networks. Unlike traditional coordinated cooperative forwarding schemes that require a large amount of coordination information to be exchanged before making the forwarding decision, this paper proposes an uncoordinated cooperative forwarding scheme where each node, a random transmission range, decides whether or not to forward a received packet independently based on a forwarding probability determined by its own location. Analytical results are derived on the successful end-to-end transmission probability and the expected number of forwarding nodes involved in the cooperative forwarding process. The multi-hop correlations and multi-path correlations, which constitute major challenges in the analysis, are carefully considered in our analysis. Simulations are conducted to establish the performance of the proposed scheme assuming different forwarding probability functions. In addition to developing an uncoordinated cooperative forwarding scheme, which is particularly suited for the highly dynamic vehicular networks, this paper also makes important theoretical contributions on analyzing the connectivity of networks with nodes of variable and random transmission ranges.